


Becoming

by spacetango



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Flemythal, Gen, it all has to start somewhere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 21:49:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4682648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacetango/pseuds/spacetango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From an anonymous Tumblr prompt: "I wish you would write a fic where Mythal first encounters Flemeth."</p><p>So I did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Becoming

Across the cumbrous stillness of the Fade, you feel it at last: a rage-edged intent calling you to inhabit. It’s as intoxicating a feeling as a lover whispering your name in the dark. How long? Since you’ve had a lover, since you’ve thought of one?

How long since you’ve been, against all probability, a wisp of a thought?

And now, this.

You drift closer, and you tell yourself it’s because you will it, but be honest, for whatever honesty’s worth to a thing like you: you’re drawn here by the incandescent fury demanding its reckoning. _Of you._ Someone heard you calling, and now calls to you. How can you help but answer?

There: prostrate before your defaced and broken likeness is a woman whose hair pools blood-dark on the cold ground. The heavy millennia crumble for an instant, and your are once again slipping on a polished floor slick with your own blood. _No._ She shivers as if she felt your panic, and you are pulled back to here and now by the icy grip of her rage, implacable, exact, demanding. A curious creature, this woman. This human mage.

The air tenses with her purpose, and she says, “Lady, please.”

Had you a face, you would smile. You didn’t think she’d make the connection, nor give you your due. You are so very famished, and it is good to be fed.

“Help me, Lady.”

Plea. Obeisance. Demand. You are not sure which struggles to the surface—perhaps all of them, transmuted by her will into something that could, perhaps, serve your purpose.

 _—…Speak_ , you say. Not words. Word shapes, flowering bright in her mind. The memory of your voice, not unlike hers, trickling into existence: soft moss masking the flinty rock underneath.

Her hope courses, reckless and living, through what’s left of you. You already know her story, howled out in dreams, lived by you: same board, different pieces. She is measured now. Her words unfold like the petals of a familiar flower, and you feel your nonexistent fingers twitch to crush it. Are you so similar? You would laugh, had you still a mouth, so instead you dive into her mana as into a cold, crisp pool, and reemerge, a frozen gust of hissing wind. She does not flinch, nor falter in her telling.

Betrayal is the same, is it not, no matter the creature. You open yourself, you love, and when the inevitable happens all you can do is stagger about in dumb, mortal surprise. Sometimes you live. Sometimes you don’t. Either way, no truth can better show you yourself. Betrayal is a birth.

_—Enough!_

“Lady?” Her gaze rests, speculative, on the icy scatter your mirth left behind. She has lovely eyes, this Flemeth, like clouds ready to unleash their lightning. Grief etched lines border her full mouth, and her taut angles are all the sharper for the love-mellowed softness her story implies they replaced. It is, you realize with something resembling surprise, like looking in a mirror, one grimy with time but no less able to reflect.

 _—What you want, and more, I can give you. But._ You pause for effect as the ice crystals converge on your location in a simulacrum of you. Its arm coruscates with your gesture. _—Nothing is free for the taking._

“You’ve seen my dreams, Lady. I could kill him, work subterfuge the like he’s never seen, and let him know I hold his life in my hands just before I end it. But that would be, no matter how cunning, easy, and I am not here for easy.” She splays her hands, palms upward, a supplicant gesture rendered defiant by the line of her jaw. “There are currents, Lady, moving us this way and that, as they, I suspect, moved us here. They move us still, and I will not be tossed about by simple vengeance like a raft on a storm-fraught sea. I want— I want to know _nothing_ of his will survive the ages. And for that—”

 _—For that, you need_ me _._

“We need each other, Lady. I came prepared to accept what I believe you offer.”

She stands and approaches you, fearless. It’s what drew you to her, her will, her focus, never once lost as she raged.

You circle her, coil like perfume in her dark hair, touch your edges to the mana roiling within her. Ice crystals cling to her eyelashes, and you can feel the hot and eager flutter of the pulse in her neck almost as if it was your own. Life is needful. _You_ are needful.

 _—Very well_.

And so, you flow into Flemeth, and she into you. Flow is poetic. You will laugh at this later.

The truth is you take messy root. She screams, a raw sound, as perhaps you once screamed. Needful, you burrow, deep beneath sinew, inside bone. You tug at her mana and course through her blood, spread yourself in her organs. You race the length of her spine, fit yourself to her strong human limbs. You expand, settle, and when it is done—

I breathe.  



End file.
